Minesweeper cheats vista

A similar site exists at www. Each year there are one or two international tournaments , where the best players meet and compete. A famously easy game known as the Dreamboard led to the discovery of Board Cycles in The Beginner 8x8 and Intermediate 16x16 levels have a small set of games that repeat.

Players used this information to memorise and play only the best boards. Knowing information about a game before it starts is banned and called having Unfair Prior Knowledge.

Elmar Technique is also banned from rankings. Microsoft versions of Minesweeper are no longer accepted for world rankings. Although Vista solved these problems it changed several rules, making its scores useless for comparison. The community solved these problems by creating official clones. Each of these use decimal time and automatically save your best times on video. Robert Donner and Curt Johnson were both hired by Microsoft in Robert wanted to write a game for Windows as a programming exercise, and Curt let him have the source code to use as a starting point.

He wrote the main application over a weekend and kept the original number and mine graphics. Curt was involved with "the inital random ideas we had for the game. After watching a friend test the program, Donner changed the goal of the game to opening all safe squares.

The original version had hidden coins that allowed you to survive stepping on a mine. Instead of the time counter there was a coin counter. A later release replaced the mouse cursor with a foot, which turned into a bloody stump when a mine was hit.

According to Donner, "I did the graphics for this, so it didn't look very good". Donner added the famous XYZZY cheat "so another friend of mine could impress people with his psychic abilities". This cheat was a magic word in Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first games he had played on a computer. Chording was added after watching a much faster friend clicking through the game.

In keeping with the foot cursor, the original Help file called this a 'Big Step'. As the game involved mines and was written for Windows, he named the executable file Winmine. He added the Smiley Face, and the "idea for the sunglasses was grabbed from one of the card decks in Solitaire.

Sometime after the release of Windows 3. Employees were asked to submit games, and Donner submitted Winmine and TicTactics. According to Donner, "The Minesweeper title was selected after Microsoft legal did a name search and gave us a few options. Donner notes that "Microsoft never really 'acquired' a copyright for Minesweeper. I worked for the company, wrote the game by myself, on my own time, on their equipment, and distributed it free to friends within the company. Eventually a Product Manager decided to put together an entertainment package and released it with several other games.

For the first WEP release, most of the games were already complete. For WEP 2, they put out a more official call for submissions". One of these versions passed amongst friends was Mine 2. It featured bombs instead of mines and a 24x24 Expert grid.

Webster defines duff as "of poor quality". The WEP edition of the game listed the version as Minesweeper 3. Robert Donner and Curt Johnson are listed as authors with the copyright belonging to Microsoft. The game became famous when Microsoft included it alongside Solitaire in the release of Windows 3. Unique ideas are rare, and computer games are no exception. Minesweeper owes its existence to earlier games. The object is to cross a minefield starting at the bottom of the grid and arriving at the top.

After each move you are warned of adjacent mines. There are nine levels to the game which add features such as damsels to be rescued, a mine that chases you, and mine spreaders that add or remove mines.

The player moves around the grid using a keyboard. In it the player needs to get three paratroopers across a busy road and then across a minefield in order to win medals. This game was not officially released but was passed between friends at work and through Bulletin Board Systems in the USA. It also featured a rectangular grid of squares 9x15 and warned you of adjacent mines. Its new features included crossing from left to right, counting mines located diagonally, adding a move counter and a timer.

Instead of having nine levels it allowed you to change the number of mines from 10 to 40, and you were upgraded from a worm to a Marine. Relentless Logic in turn inspired various clones. He introduced a Mouse and used the left button to open squares, the middle button to mark mines and the right button to mark safe squares.

The grid was increased to 16x16 and the number of mines increased. Brian Dalio USA modifed the game over the next month to allow users to move to any square previously visited. A major innovation was putting numbers in previously visited squares to remind you how many mines it touched. At the end of the game, incorrectly marked mines were highlighted with an 'X'. When Robert Donner expressed an interest in programming a game for Windows, Curt gave him the sourcecode as a starting point.

Over the next year the game evolved into Minesweeper. Sometimes games have similar features completely by accident. Several early games have been claimed as the origin of Minesweeper purely on this idea. This section discusses various possibilities.

The player faces a cube with 27 vertices of which 5 contain randomly placed mines. Your job is to navigate from 1,1,1 to 3,3,3 without detonating a mine. There is no skill involved, as there are no clues to help you avoid the mines.

If you survive your bank account increases, if you lose it decreases. The betting game continues until you run out of money. This is the first known game featuring hidden mines. David Ahl published many other user submitted programs, including several hidden object games. All of these games were code printouts the user needed to type into their computer. The original edition featured the games Hurkle, Mugwump and Queen.

In Hurkle the player has 5 tries to guess the coordinate of a hidden Hurkle on a 10x10 grid. After each incorrect guess the game states the direction of the hidden monster. In Mugwump the player has 10 guesses to find 4 hidden Mugwumps on a 10x10 grid. After each guess the distance to each Mugwump is stated but not the direction.

For example, after guessing 5,5 the game may warn you are 4. These two games are early examples of using clues or numbers to locate objects. In Queen the player places a chess queen on the top or rightmost row of an 8x8 grid. The player then alternates turns with the computer, trying be first to the bottom left corner using legal chess moves.

This is an early example of a grid crossing game. The edition featured Blackbox. In this game the player locates atoms hidden on an 8x8 grid by shooting a ray across the grid and observing deflections. In addition to writing Hurkle, Bob Albrecht also wrote Snark. The player guesses a coordinate and chooses the radius of a net to throw. The game tells you if the Snark is in the net, and your job is to capture it with a zero radius net. As these surviving examples show, grid games using clues to find hidden objects were common by the early 's.

By there was at least one game with hidden mines and another with the object of crossing a grid. Minefield was printed in the May edition of Sinclair User magazine. The new menu is not user friendly. To change a level you must select the menu and try to decide whether you need to change options or settings.

If you guess correctly you will be able to select the other two levels. The old menu was simple and efficient. Vista does not let you type your name when you set a new record.

Instead it automatically saves the score and the date for each of your five best scores on each level. Beginner, Intermediate and Expert have separate highscore windows. It is sad to see the entry box go, but the inclusion of dates and a more complete highscore list is excellent from the viewpoint of evidence for rankings.

A botched feature is the inclusion of stats. The game displays your win percentage, winning streak, losing streak and current streak for each level. Microsoft has no clue what type of stats Minesweeper players are interested in, so they pretend it is Freecell. Every game in Freecell can be solved without guessing and the goal is to solve them all.

It is not the goal of Minesweeper to solve all games, it is the goal of Minesweeper to solve games as fast as is possible. Often you must guess, often you will make mistakes related to speed. Professional players start several hundred games per hour and finish a handful. Vista stats are displayed in truncated integers, making it highly unexciting to see your Expert win percentage at zero and your best winning streak at one.

They should have browsed the internet and offered basic Minesweeper stats like 3BV. Microsoft tries to help your stats by allowing you to replay games until you win them. They also guarantee an opening on the first click to eliminate at least half the games lost in the first few seconds. This click advantage makes it nearly impossible to use Vista on the current rankings. Firstly, an opening on the first click offers a time advantage by eliminating the time spent trying to find an opening.

Secondly, it increases the odds of winning. A person who plays on other versions will have to play far longer complete the same number of boards.

This advantage will be hard to quantify, making it nearly impossible to rank Vista scores alongside the current records. Vista allows you to replay each game until you win. Create a high density Custom level and save pictures of easy boards then use a macro to cycle through minesweeper to find and play the same boards again. Use a debugging program to locate the memory block storing the current Minesweeper game. Improve user experience by writing a program to show mine locations.

Open two instances of Arbiter, Clone or Viennasweeper simultaneously. The same seed will be used and both instances will produce identical sequences of games. Use a debugging program to edit assembly language and choose the PRNG seed. The same seed will always generate the same board. However, official versions since seed the PRNG before every game and the seeding process is obfuscated.

Use a debugging program to edit assembly language code. For example, pause the timer or flag all mines. Reverse engineer a video file format. You could write a program to edit existing video files or you could write a minesweeper game that allows UPK and saves to this format. Remember also to hack a history file format to support your altered videos. Program a macro to start Beginner games and click randomly.

You will eventually win a game in one second. Program a solver to play minesweeper using logic but include options for human interaction to make videos more realistic. Change your mouse settings to reduce effort and save time. For example, a cell normally opens when you press and release the left mouse button but "Elmar Technique" is a NF method where you change the mouse to open cells on both pressing and releasing.